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One's personality is both a composition and reflection, but if I have to choose one of them, I will choose reflection as the "self" is more important to me than "me". One's composition may change, walking across the cultural landscapes and climbing the social ladder but one's self is tied to one's reflections. The fun part is that reflections are not bound to "Time-Space" barriers ( it is not time-space) and respective mental constructs, which have grown so thick over ages, that they had reduced the image of humans to Sisyphus, rolling different sizes of boulders on hills of different heights.… As the name of this Blog indicates, knols are my perspectives on topics of interests, sweet/bitter experiences or just doodling :)

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Reading Chinese Machiavelli

Unlike all major ancient civilizations that had become part of history, Chinese civilization is the only one which went through all historical stages without any fall. The continuity of Chinese civilization is a challenge to generalized historical theories of rise and fall of civilizations. In fact Chinese civilization has all characteristics and characters of any ancient civilization. Guess what? it has also my favorite character, "Socrates". Socrates was a revolutionary figure in ancient Greek Philosophy as he turned the practice of Sophism into discipline of Philosophy. While mentioning Socrates, it is a matter of interest to note that it was Socrates' students who turned to evolve the single handed movement of their teacher into a successful "intellectual revolution" by setting up schools such as Academia by Plato in first generation and Lyceum by Aristotle in second generation.

So what we know about Socrates comes through the writings of his students especially through "Republic" of Plato that includes sketches about life, personality and dialogues of Socrates. It might be a matter of amusement to note that an identical picture comes from China. The 'Analects of Confucius" is equivalent to the "Republic" of Plato and is not written by Confucius himself but by his disciples. Although, there is a contrast between Socrates' life styles and circumstances, interests and even practices but their roles are almost similar in their respective civilizations and to me Confucius is Chinese Socrates. Confucius is well known both in East and West and his philosophy has been practiced not only in China but also in neighboring countries, what we know as East Asian countries....

If I have to grandly classify the world based on their philosophies, I would say historically there are three geo-philosophical regions (These regions are distinct in their philosophies),

Spiritual East, that includes, North Africa, Middle East, South and Central Asia, Practical Far-East that includes Eastern Asian Nations and Idealist West that include western nations...

Although Chinese philosophy has not the taste of spiritualism and idealism but its practicality makes it palatable to common instincts.

When one looks for a practical Philosopher in the Western world, Machiavelli is the most likely name to come first in his mind. Because Machiavelli's practical philosophy does not fit very well to idealistic Western Philosophy and Spiritual Eastern Philosophy so he is looked upon as a philosopher of ruling class and Machiavelli himself was looking to himself in the same way and it is perhaps why he was named his most famous book, "The Prince"... If you are familiar with Machiavelli then Sun Tzu is not an alien to you except that Sun Tzu is taller in practicality than Machiavelli..

As globalization pushing the nations closer to each other, we see the inertia in the form of new conflicts and new means of competitions to increase the spheres of influences. It is quite predictable that fear of losing is by-product of this globalization inertia. If the East is scared of decline in spirituality, the West is worried about scrambling of idealism. Even layman can sense the ad hoc responses to current challenges. While Eastern and Western Philosophies are just looking into cultural aspects of conflicts, the Sun Tzu tells us why certain regions of world are land of conflicts.. Why certain places and people faces uninvited wars and conflicts again and again?

Following is a documentary about Sun Tzu's book, "The Art of War". While, I am not interested in war but I believe that in order to understand Peace, one needs to understand war and conflicts. It is necessary to understand why certain people are victims of conflicts and why certain people are interested in war instead of Peace....
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